Taco Bell

Play The Future First

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Collaborating with Deutsch L.A. and director Simon McQuoid on Taco Bell 'Play the Future First', The Mill visually sets the stage for a war torn neighborhood complete with collapsed buildings, dust and smoke, and residual flames atop mounds of debris. The music escalates as a band of armed survivors run into a battlefield, surely expecting to face their enemies, but instead find a group of unperturbed young men amidst a mass of defeated robots. It turns out the group received their PlayStation 4 consoles early, thanks to the Taco Bell $5 Box, and the arriving players missed out on all of the action.

The Mill's Nick Tayler, 2D artist, explains what it takes to create a fantasy war zone from scratch: "Fusing old world Czech architecture with the aftermath of an intense robot war was a fantastic challenge for us and really allowed us to make use of the full range of our team's abilities-from concept art and look development, to modeling, lighting and compositing."

"Our design teams were entrusted with designing an entire robot army and showing how it was defeated. We embraced the challenge and incredible detail from early concept all the way up to final composition," says lead 3D artist Gawain Liddiard.

This required taking an inventive (and efficient) approach to realize the immersive world of chaos that is 'Play the Future First'. Liddiard says: "The Mill team utilized many of their latest 3D asset pipeline tools to cash out geometry and get render and set-up times down to a minimum. This was well integrated with layers of projected matte paintings and 2D elements to rapidly build expansive scenes."